Mission as conversion

Introduction

Christian mission has a long history revealing much development and evolution in churches’ response to the different challenges of evangelization. What follows is an account of a segment of it as I relate my experience as a Catholic missionary to Zambia in the late 20th century. This was initially colored by a long-held idea of conversion of pagans to Catholicism as the only way to salvation. However, in the aftermath of Vatican II, the Catholic Church recognized the salvific value of other Christian churches and faith traditions (Carmody, 1992: 4; D’Costa, 2009: 7, 19–20; Race & Hedges, 2008). In 1973, as a newly arrived missionary in Zambia, this changing perspective on conversion operated in the Catholic school where I would spend much of my time.

Becoming a missionary

In late 1950s Ireland, where I grew up, almost the whole population was Catholic. Everyone went to Mass on Sundays under pain of what was called mortal sin; similarly, we all had to abstain from meat on Fridays. At primary school, we got the rudiments of our faith (Gallagher, 2008; Williams, 2013; MacMahon, 1992). As part of a Catholic family, I became familiar with numerous devotions and pious practices among which featured concern for the so-called foreign missions. This hinged on the spread of the Catholic Church to other parts of the world and the need for conversion to Catholicism in places like China, Africa, and India. At first, these were just lifeless names. They started to take on some reality through the pictures I saw in religious magazines which slowly opened my eyes to the fact that the world was not totally Catholic, nor totally Irish!

With this fleeting image of what a missionary might be, I went to a Catholic secondary school which reinforced my growing sense of Catholic identity with daily Mass and a school day studded with such Catholic devotions as morning and night prayers, the rosary, and benediction (Deane, 2015: 88–95). Missionary advocacy was minimal. Nonetheless, through those years the notion of being a missionary remained.

When I left secondary school in the mid-1960s, the theology of Vatican II had begun to filter through as the traditional idea of conversion to Catholicism was reviewed. The Church was becoming more open to other forms of religion and ideologies which included social development, underpinned by a commitment to justice (Carmody, 1992: 4). This reconceptualization of the nature of a missionary tradition meant that the Church’s emphasis on conversion of non-Catholics became less pivotal.

As a Jesuit in the early days of my studies, I volunteered and was sent as a missionary to Zambia. As I understood it, I was going as part of a large group of Jesuits to aid the less well-off sectors of the world, which included a readiness to communicate the Catholic message. This pivoted on the old idea of conversion, though this was being reconfigured. The meaning of conversion became ambiguous.

Crossing the equator

Even if I was going to Zambia for perhaps only two years, crossing the equator dramatically marked my movement from home. I realized that I was leaving my familiar ground in Europe behind and faced what was largely unknown. Encountering a new world about which I was hugely ignorant left me feeling somewhat rootless as I soon had to learn a local language and become familiar with a strange way of life.

In meeting that new reality of days on end with bright sunshine, long dusty roads, and miles and miles of bushland, I also came across peoples who seemed ever happy as they trekked along with heavy loads on their backs and lived without great luxury. I had to translate such images and concepts into my landscape. This could be seen to be a process of what has been called dialogue. It initially meant feeling lost like a child in the woods.

As I tasted mangos, the local maize-dish, nshima, embedded in a warm and generous hospitality, I became more familiar with the Tonga way of life. I visited the villages, listened to how people chatted and observed their daily round as I tried awkwardly to use some local idioms. Meanwhile, I read local history. What sociologists spoke about was all new: rain-shrines, ancestral spirits, bride-wealth, and so much more (Colson, 1962). One could say that my daily visits and reading were stepping-stones into what seemed such a new world. Slippery stepping-stones, admittedly! Often, when I thought I was on solid ground, that was far from true.

Becoming a teacher

As a key part of my mission, I was assigned to teach at a Catholic secondary school. It was an all-boys school with roughly 700 students, 30 teachers mainly coming from Ireland, England, the Philippines, India, Holland, as some Zambians were joining. The school in southern Zambia, as many similar settings, aimed to produce well-rounded Catholics, somewhat on the lines of a Renaissance ideal—a person who would have the basic skills and know-how to live a flourishing life, whether in Lusaka or New York. When I once supported my class in questioning the educational value for them of learning Latin, I swiftly lost that class largely because it was deemed by the school head that I was a poor Latin teacher. Perhaps I was but any teacher should be concerned with how pupils valued the subject of their learning which seemed so foreign.

As somebody who had grown up while Vatican II was underway, my sense of mission was shaded differently when compared with that of many of my predecessors. I did not come primarily “to save souls” by feverishly rushing to baptize people. While concern for eternal salvation may have been important to me, I felt that the church needed to pay more attention to people here and now (Ela, 1981: 326).

In line with such changes in church and mission perspectives, Canisius College as it was known was in a state of transition. It was moving slowly and unclearly away from when it had a high degree of autonomy where the church and school worked so closely together as the school was largely catechetical—an instrument of church evangelization.

When the Zambian government assumed power in 1964, it took major control in what it saw as a national program of investment in what was termed “human capital” (Carmody, 2004: 26). As a result, many of the students who enrolled at Canisius were non-Catholic. Though government was not concerned to preserve denominational schools, it retained religious education as a curriculum subject. The issue now was, What kind of religious education was needed in a Catholic school where the student population was preponderantly non-Catholic?

Over a few years, a new ecumenical program was developed which was seen to be Christian. This led me to question my perspectives. How was I owning the tradition where missionaries had come to this part of the world to convert the people to Catholicism as a first step to setting up the church infrastructure? Such formed the backdrop on how I spent many years as a teacher in various classrooms at secondary, teacher education, and university levels.

Within the classroom, my teaching of religion in this new ecumenical mode became what might be termed sociological. It resembled what Michael Grimmitt termed “learning about,” by which he meant getting the essential facts and details about various forms of Christianity (Grimmitt, 2000: 207). I occasionally questioned both the evangelical or missionary and educational value of what I taught.

As a religion teacher, this led me to look more closely at what religion itself meant. I gradually discovered that, as a category, it had emerged from Western scholarship where it became an abstraction separated from its roots. It had developed in response to how people wondered about the mystery of life. They pondered where they had come from, what was their purpose on earth, and what would happen to them after death. This had been conceptualized as religion and was the kind of religion I was teaching. It was not only Western but abstract and normative (Jackson, 1997: 50–53). This undergirded missionaries’ mode of evangelizing for many years as they went to other parts of the world. There they sought evidence of their particular concept of religion. Not finding it, they concluded that those to whom they came did not have a religion, and so for example traditional African religions failed to be included. It was true that they did not have that particular Western articulation of religion. Yet, they had a worldview with ultimate horizons that served them, formulated in their own terms. This expression of religion was sidelined.

This Western view of religion came to mean for instance that French-, Irish-, or Polish-style churches with Jewish-rooted ritual and worship appeared in remote areas of Zambia. As Dominic Mulaisho recalls, Katondwe Mission Church, in the middle of the country, was built of red brick, a beautiful instance of Polish architecture with a Gothic dome, capped by shining aluminum; a miniature St. Peter’s (Mulaisho, 1971: 37). What resulted could be seen as a form of Western religion without roots in local life.

I thus slowly became aware that I was teaching a religious text that had little life. This opened my eyes to what Grimmitt was later to call “learning from” religion:

. . . when I speak of pupils learning from religion I am referring to what pupils learn from their studies of religion about themselves—about discerning ultimate questions and “signals of transcendence” in their own experience and considering how they might respond to them. (Grimmitt, 1987: 225–26)

“Learning from” is focused on students’ personal development so that what is learned is assimilated into their lives. While I could see some value in “learning about” religion and religions (Grimmitt, 1987: 225; Noddings, 2008: 369), it left students with a tourist’s view and so failed to provide religious education in any depth. Yet, as a religious education teacher, I realized that religion as a subject of study had come to be viewed more and more like other subjects on the curriculum.

As years went by, this disjunction between text and text in real life contributed to my prevailing unease. Almost anybody could teach the type of religion I was presenting whatever his or her religious or nonreligious background. What was more crucial to the students and the system of schooling was that it should be treated with the kind of academic rigor that other subjects were given. In doing this, I wondered how this kind of religious education touched the lives of students and how it promoted their well-being. Nonetheless this academic type approach was what students generally wanted because it would give them good marks in their courses which would add up to gaining good degrees as the path to good jobs in an environment where employment was a problem. At least on that level, the subject had attraction. If I opened discussion for instance on why Judas was not given a second chance or on the relative guilt of Adam and Eve, eyes became dim. The crucial issue was, would it be on the exam?

What I thus taught was largely “learning about” religion though it needed to be more. It needed to be more than viewing stained glass windows from outside. However, I found myself progressively locked into an examination-focused paradigm which was the dominant perspective on education in Zambia. This did little to facilitate students’ learning about themselves or personal reflection on life’s big questions. They could, especially at the higher levels, perhaps accurately describe what it meant to be a Christian, Muslim, Jew, or whatever, but this did not lead them to evaluate their own understanding of, and commitment to, religion. It had almost nothing to do with conversion to Christianity or whatever in so far as conversion implied viewing various religions as potential options for oneself.

The question for me became, How could religious education become personally engaging? How was I to move students from “learning about” to “learning from” religion? This dilemma was not new, though I was now identifying it more clearly. After all, I had experienced this as I grew up and learned ready-made religious answers to somebody else’s questions in religious education classes as they were then conducted (Donoghue, 1991: 62). This lack of a “learning from” approach even extended to when I studied theology, but by the late 1960s this was breaking down.

As a Jesuit missionary, I wondered how this form of religious education which I offered was linked to conversion. As I reflected on Lonergan’s Method in Theology, I came to realize that he advocated a distinctively different approach to religion from what I had known. He spoke of a movement away from what was traditionally catechetical where learning could too easily focus on abstractions about God and religion and less on reality (Palmer, 2000: 67). Lonergan’s perspective entailed more than the quasi-objective catechetical horizon. He realized that this way of approaching the study of religion was part of a wider problem; it concerned knowledge itself.

What took place in my classes tended to remain on the level of knowledge as rooted in what was experienced externally. It was characteristically abstract and distant from the real life of the learners. It needed to be better linked to practice (Lewin, 2018). In Lonergan’s terms, the paradigms of learning emanating from natural science and personal life represented two distinct modes of knowing. Both have value but need to be distinguished. Otherwise, confusion is generated. If one assumes for instance that “learning about” is equivalent to “learning from” religion, one fails to appreciate this critical distinction with significant implications for knowledge. What the students were learning in class was, as already postulated, predominantly “learning about” when it should better include “learning from.” Such “learning about” was the accepted norm in Zambian schooling, but it fed into what had been seen to be a major flaw where

many Zambians today face an uneasy sense of homelessness and rootlessness. Several seem unable to reconcile traditional values and approaches and the imperatives of urban living, though to a great extent their mode of responding to social, cultural and economic situations is dominated by a traditionalist outlook. Rapid urbanisation has also hastened the demise of many customs and traditions. This is a loss which the schools have done little to prevent. (Focus on Learning, 1992: 9)

What students learned remained notional, missing a “learning from” dimension.

Drawing on this distinction between “learning about” and “learning from” and realizing its importance for the study of religion, I noted how Lonergan spoke of theology not as primarily doctrines but as experience-based (Lonergan, 1973: 131). Such a starting point in the student’s experience called for clarification of what “experience” might mean. “Learning about” religion could evidently be experiential—one could go to the temples and churches to see what went on there. This had value but what personal significance did this have for the learner? This needed inclusion. To do this, Lonergan articulated a new method of learning where experience included both an outer and an inner dimension. In the terms I am using, the outer element roughly equated to “learning about” and the inner “learning from.” For a religious educator embedded in a predominantly “learning about” system as I was, any transition on the part of the learner to a “learning from” mode seemed to be an enormous challenge. How could this personal dimension be developed?

For Lonergan, it needs a certain kind of reflection which is distinct from listening to lectures or reading widely. It is a matter of heightening one’s consciousness by objectifying it and that is something each one, ultimately, has to do in him- or herself (Lonergan, 1973: 14–15). It means reflection on our experience of transcendence—our human capacity to wonder which enables us to go beyond our present situation and even now reach the planets (Lonergan, 1973: 106; Palmer, 1998/1999: 1). Through this self-reflection, we come to encounter life at different levels of depth. It may lead us to various degrees of insecurity about our conventional worldviews, opening us to where we have to decide what we want to make of ourselves. Lonergan spoke of such transformational moments as conversion. Though a religious term, he extended its meaning and spoke of it as a fundamental change not only within one’s normal worldview but a choice of the worldview itself (Lonergan, 1973: 131, 237–38, 268). It could mean challenging our preconceptions and frameworks for understanding so that we have a context for truly assimilating new insights by being ready to move beyond our familiar worldviews (Burbules, 1990: 474).

Lonergan identified different areas of one’s life where such conversion might occur, namely in the religious, intellectual, moral, and emotional areas. For holistic development, conversion at all levels should occur. However, their individual emergence takes different paths in the lives of individuals though they interlink. Since our principal concern in the religious education class was Catholic and Christian conversion, how was Lonergan’s notion of conversion connected to them? Lonergan’s new notion of conversion is more fundamental. It can occur at a religious level from which the person may adopt Catholicism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and the like as an expression of the more basic transcendent dynamic (Lonergan, 1973: 105–107; Carmody, 1985: 57–65).

For Lonergan, how somebody chooses a version of religion located in religious conversion can vary enormously, as the history of religion illustrates. Ideally, for Lonergan, it is informed by intellectual conversion:

. . . the elimination of an exceedingly stubborn myth concerning reality, objectivity, and knowledge. The myth is that knowing is like looking, that objectivity is seeing what is there. The myth overlooks the distinction between the world of immediacy and that mediated by meaning and so confuses what is seen with what is real whereas reality as known is not just what is seen but what is given in experience, organized and extrapolated by understanding and posited by judgement. (Lonergan, 1973: 238)

This is the key element in Lonergan’s ideal of knowledge and consequently of personal development and education, whether religious or other (Lonergan, 1973: 268).

Gradually, this focus on intellectual conversion following from religious experience became my guiding but latent teaching motif. Catholic or Christian conversion, which had been pivotal to my life as a missionary, was thus relocated. The new emphasis did not exclude educating people toward Catholic or Christian conversion, but what became primary was to guide the students more fundamentally toward religious conversion, ideally accompanied by intellectual conversion. From there, they would be enabled to choose their form of religion intelligently and wisely.

Trying to get my classroom students to reflect on their cognitive, affective, religious, and moral reasoning proved to be a major challenge—or in other terms, it heightened their consciousness by objectifying it. As I saw it, teaching religion was not only concerned to impart doctrines which the religious education program fostered. It also should initiate the learner into acquiring self-awareness as a route to owning or rejecting any such teaching.

Pedagogical and pastoral implications

By advocating Lonergan’s religious conversion allied with initial intellectual conversion, both student and teacher become aware of their own presuppositions as a prelude to objectively interpreting different religions and worldviews. It does not necessarily exclude comparing and contrasting viewpoints but is primarily concerned with their more fundamental grounding in the experience of adherents.

In the Zambian classroom, students’ religious experience, as articulated by being Catholics, Seventh-day Adventists, or whatever, may have looked similar to mine and to that of each other in so far as they appeared to have a common core. Because of this, I operated on the assumption that religious experience formed a common basis for ecumenical and even for interfaith union and cooperation (Carmody, 2015: 509; Hick, 2006). While this had value in a country so long divided religiously, it concealed the fact that such experiences, despite appearing similar, could be highly diverse. Their conceptualizations were linked closely to particular religious experiences (Bellah, 2011: 12). This does not necessarily mean that such experience is so personal that it has to remain private, but generalization needs to be guarded if it is to reflect the true nature of the experience (Jackson, 2008; Wright, 2008).

Undoubtedly, it is a challenge to speak openly about other forms of religion from within a tradition where one is convinced of the truth of one’s position. However, speaking in terms of one’s own or others’ conceptualization of religion without delving into how this emerges could be compared to when literary critics confront texts in high-energy physics. Not knowing high-energy physics, they compare texts, thereby omitting the reality (Lamb, 1990: 69). On the other hand, approaching such texts through intellectual conversion entails encountering the text as grounded in a more-than-surface understanding.

Thus, for effective dialogue, one has to approach the other person more than on the level of words; he or she has to be addressed in his or her historicity as I have to also acknowledge the historicity of my words (Lonergan, 1974b: 74, 85; Freire, 1985: 128: Buber, 1947: 95, 97, 100, 114; Burbules and Rice, 1991). In this setting, when approaching African religion, missionaries interpreted them in terms of what they already knew. Similarities and apparent overlap were encouraging and facilitated translation as for instance happened when early missionaries used traditional terms for their theological concepts. A clear instance of this is where the Christian idea of God was presented in terms of what was traditional. In the translation of the Bible much of this took place, but for the most part it represented a kind of one-way dialogue. For much of my time in Zambia, this seemed acceptable but dialogue needs to be a two-way mode of communication where both partners respect and are respected by each other. Otherwise, we can have something like what I have referred to as comparing texts without proper understanding.

Lonergan spoke somewhat paradoxically of this dilemma as neglect of the subject (Lonergan, 1974b). He saw it when we operate in an overly subjectivist way (Lonergan, 1973: 292). As I became more conscious of this one-sidedness in the classroom where I was presenting concepts without root in life, I asked students to go to the district and speak with people who had converted. Later, this resulted in developing a research course where students chose to do projects. These projects were attractive, in part because they engaged them in a more than “learning about” way. Projects could connect students’ study of religion with life.

What appeared to be written as true in textbooks resembled the literary critics speaking about high-energy physics. The so-called objective text needed to be contextualized, taking proper account of those about whom it was written. Robert Serpell (2007) illustrated the dynamics of this when he spoke of Zambian students’ experience of school literacy. He identified it as detached and text-based, which the Zambian student half-owned. Serpell estimated that most students originate from families where literacy is restricted, and rely on an indigenous language for self-expression. Students’ English exists in the shadow of their local languages. In such circumstances there is a tendency to compartmentalize academic learning and so insulate it from its source. In Serpell’s view, project work has the potential to break down such separation. In a sense, what I wanted was that students should move beyond compartmentalizing.

On the other hand, armed with subjectivity that leads to true objectivity through intellectual conversion, dialogical communication in the classroom and beyond becomes more feasible as it entails recognition of the self as knower (Lonergan, 1974a: 273). The other is consequently recognized not as part of me but as distinct. His or her specificity as a person can be more truly addressed. For the missionary as for the anthropologist, this means more than observation; it means entering the world of the potential convert or person studied at a level where his or her voice is properly heard (Wiebe, 1999: 151–52). This entails learning the language of the other. It is where one develops capacity to relate to specific voices like the scientist that realizes that there are proper and common norms (Lonergan, 1973: 222–23). Besides the tasks related to each specific field there are interdisciplinary and dialogical issues which require a larger framework. To move objectively from specific viewpoints to others requires an assimilative capacity generated by intellectual conversion which enables us to appreciate the specific while at the same time allowing us to remain sufficiently free to choose authentically.

Conclusion

My overarching religious education challenge lay in my own gradual and slow movement from texts to what lay behind them. It eventually led me to encourage students to adopt a new method—that of self-awareness, heightening one’s consciousness by objectifying it, as a means to self-criticism and true freedom to choose. It means sustained reflection on our experience of transcendence—our human capacity to wonder which enables us to go beyond our present situation and even now reach the planets. This remained a challenge and is perhaps central to being a missionary and religious educator today. It resembles what Carl Rogers, echoing St. Augustine, postulated, that one cannot teach another (Rogers, 1974: 103–14; Puolimatka, 2005: 191–200).

What adoption of this approach to conversion in the classroom or without thus means is that people are not simply confronted with potted versions of religion. Rather, they are prepared through movement from religious to intellectual conversion as a prelude to choosing freely the kind of religion or nonreligion which they have reason to value (Sen, 1999, 285).

Conversion could be said to be pivotal to my mission in Zambia as its meaning shifted, beginning with Catholic conversion, later becoming more ecumenical. I gradually learned that this needed a better grounding, which Lonergan’s notion of religious and intellectual conversion supplied. It led me to appreciate that subjectivity needs to be more than subjectivist if the missionary is to genuinely address the potential newcomer as a part of a two-way dialogue.